Pococke: India in Greece

Edward Pococke · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 418 pages

A scanned facsimile of E. Pococke, India in Greece; or, Truth in Mythology: containing the sources of the Hellenic race, the colonisation of Egypt and Palestine, the wars of the Grand Lama, and the Bud'histic propaganda in Greece, London: John J. Griffin and Co., and Richard Griffin and Co., Glasgow, 1852, illustrated by maps of the Punjab, Cashmir and northern Greece. Like King's Gnostics and the Nicomachus volume, it is a photographic reproduction of the printed book rather than a Philaletheians-set document, and carries no embedded file properties. The book is dedicated to H.H. Wilson, Boden Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford. Blavatsky's use of Pococke appears elsewhere in this section in “India is the Mother of Greece,” which cites him directly.

Pococke's preface states both his thesis and his method. Nothing but a thorough conviction of the importance of testing the stream of history at its very source, he writes, would have induced the investigation; a gigantic mass of absurdities now lies exposed for sifting examination, and it remains for European scholarship, working on both occidental and Oriental materials, to rebuild the Temple of History which national vanity destroyed and whose ruins he says national Buddhism obscured. The reasoning that set him going is stated plainly: a persuasion that no nation, as a body of men, would or could gratuitously invent through a series of ages a set of tales fabulous in themselves yet historical in their results — so that testing the doctrine of invention against non-invention would yield a criterion for decision. His evidence is linguistic. A plain, practical and positive appeal to the language of the first Hellenic settlers is offered as the answer, and the primitive colonists are traced, he claims, with a precision secured only by the cohesion of that ancient form of society called a tribe. The body of the book applies that method to Greek tribal and place-names in turn, with the maps supplied so the reader can follow the proposed correspondences on the ground.

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